


A House Divided

by AxmxZ (Boanerges)



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types, Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: Gen, Halloween Challenge, Mental Anguish, Mental Breakdown, Mental Health Issues, Mental Instability, Psychological Horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-27
Updated: 2020-08-12
Packaged: 2021-03-06 00:54:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 4,493
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25544722
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Boanerges/pseuds/AxmxZ
Summary: This fic is a response to JenValjean24601's Halloween challenge.The bits in italics are from the book itself.
Relationships: Javert & Jean Valjean
Comments: 13
Kudos: 19





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is a response to JenValjean24601's Halloween challenge. 
> 
> The bits in italics are from the book itself.

_Les Miserables. Volume V - Book Sixth.-The Sleepless Night - Chapter IV. The Immortal Liver_

" _He remained there until daylight, in the same attitude, bent double over that bed, prostrate beneath the enormity of fate, crushed, perchance, alas! with clenched fists, with arms outspread at right angles, like a man crucified who has been un-nailed, and flung face down on the earth. There he remained for twelve hours, the twelve long hours of a long winter's night, ice-cold, without once raising his head, and without uttering a word. He was as motionless as a corpse, while his thoughts wallowed on the earth and soared, now like the hydra, now like the eagle. Any one to behold him thus motionless would have pronounced him dead; all at once he shuddered convulsively, and his mouth, glued to Cosette's garments, kissed them; then it could be seen that he was alive._

_Who could see? Since Jean Valjean was alone, and there was no one there._

_The One who is in the shadows."_

* * *

The portress was once again not to be found.

Valjean entertained briefly the thought of knocking on her door, then tried the half-shuttered window of her lodge with the stiff tips of wind-chilled fingers. The window gave, and Valjean reached in to retrieve his key from the long, rusty nail protruding above the number 7-2B.

Had Valjean any thoughts to spare to his surroundings, he might have remarked that there was a bottle of cheap brandy with about a finger of the abominable dreck left gracing the table inside and that another, smaller bottle could be seen glinting under the table, overturned and bleeding a trickle of dark, putrid-looking liquid from its neck onto the floorboards. And then perhaps he would have thought that the portress was at it again, just like last week, and was probably dead asleep on her cot, and that it was really rather careless of her to leave the booth window unlocked in a way that enabled any old passer-by to retrieve the key to any apartment of his choosing within the back court and west wing of the building, and that perhaps it was time to sit down with the silly old woman and have a serious talk about it.

But that night, Valjean was far too preoccupied to pay more than incidental attention to his surroundings. The calamity of the day behind him had deadened his responsiveness to the possibility of danger before him, in the same way that a very intensely foul odor robs one of the ability to smell odors less offensive.

He passed through the dark and gloomy courtyard, shuffling his feet along the gravel trail. Somewhere, a dog was barking itself hoarse; then a male voice came forth with some choice words for the over-excited hound. There was a crash, and the bark reduced itself to a pitiful whine.

At the door, Valjean fumbled in the basket for the matches and lit the candle, singing his fingers in the process without noticing it.

The apartment had been stripped bare. All the cupboard doors were thrown open; bits of twine and large clumps of torn parcel paper littered the corners; there were scuff-marks and faint dust squares on the floor where the lighter articles furniture had been moved and removed. As Valjean passed the dish cabinet, he heard something crunch underfoot. He looked down and saw that his shoe had ground into fine white powder a shard belonging to a late article from Toussaint's collection of porcelain bric-a-brac - a pink shepherdess and a blue boy shepherd embracing coyly against a yellow haystack. The bucolic children did not survive being unsettled from their cozy spot between the creamer and the sugar bowl.

Mechanically, Valjean closed the delicate glazed doors of the cabinet and headed upstairs. In defiance of habit, hygiene and common sense, he ascended without removing his hobnailed street-shoes. The bare walls echoed as the stairs groaned resentfully under his feet, but Valjean's apartment had no adjourning neighbors, so there was no one around fit to remark the noise -Valjean himself remained in state of a profound stupor.

For a few minutes, Valjean ambled through the apartment like a disoriented ghost. Both Toussaint's garret and Cosette's bedrooms were chilled and empty of all belongings, with the exception of a small feminine article of clothing of indeterminable purpose which lay balled up under Toussaint's folding bed, overlooked and abandoned by its mistress. Cosette's room felt unusually large and uncomfortably cold without any of the knick-knacks, laces and gaily colored chintz curtains adorning its heavy furniture and walls, and Valjean retreated from it almost immediately.

In his own bedroom, Valjean set the candle on his desk and picked up the portmanteau lying on the low round night table, retrieving the key from his pocket already on approach. The lock clicked, and Valjean spread the contents of the little valise on his bed: a pair of tiny shoes and a set of mourning clothes made for a little girl of about six years of age, all of it smelling strongly of camphor.

With trembling hands, he arranged the tiny garments on the bedspread, as if laying them out to dress little Cosette for yet another cold and exhausting day of travel: knitted petticoat, woolen stockings, woolen gown, thick bodice with a missing button, apron, scarf and bonnet, all of it impossibly tiny. Only her doll is gone, he thought, her Katherine, and the louis d'or I gave her for Noel.

And she, he thought with a sinking heart, she is also gone. My Cosette is gone.

_Then his venerable, white head fell forward on the bed, that stoical old heart broke, his face was engulfed, so to speak, in Cosette's garments, and if any one had passed up the stairs at that moment, he would have heard frightful sobs._


	2. Chapter 2

Hours seemed to pass before his tears were at an end. Afterwards, Valjean remained as he was, prone on the bedspread with his face buried in scented black wool: there did not seem to be a point in getting up. There did not seem to be a point in anything anymore. With his arm for a pillow and still kneeling on the floor, Valjean fell into a reverie, and then into uneasy slumber.

He did not know what roused him, but when he came to, Valjean was certain that something had happened in the house during his sleep. He raised his face from the bedspread. Had there been a noise? The house was deadly quiet and unbearably cold; Valjean's knees and legs had gotten chilled to the bone marrow against the icy wooden floorboards.

Valjean looked out the window. It was snowing, and must have been for some time now: an even layer of virgin white covered the courtyard flowerbeds, and heavy snow garlands adorned the bare branches of the sickly trees. There was a light on in the portress' lodge: her companion must have returned from her night's work at the tavern.

Perhaps it was the light that woke me, thought Valjean uncertainly.

Then somewhere above Toussaint's garret, in the attic, a plank creaked dolefully – the one Valjean had never gotten around to replacing. Almost as though in response to it, the wind picked up outside, whistling and whooshing against the frosted windowpanes.

Ah, thought Valjean.

The sleep did not refresh him. Wakefulness came in the middle of a not-quite-nightmare where Valjean found himself wrestling with a corpse. The particulars were already fading from his mind, but Valjean could still recall that the corpse was unusually strong – inhumanly so – and had a countenance that was weary but mulish, which Valjean found at once strange and also utterly familiar. At one point, Valjean remembered, the idea came to him that an animated corpse is an undead thing and as such might ostensibly be afraid of the sign of the Cross; however, before he had even raised his hand to make the sign over the thick grey cloth covering the corpse's breast, the corpse had himself quickly freed one of his arms from Valjean's grip and made the sign over Valjean himself. At that point, it became obvious to Valjean that this thought came from the corpse itself. He had awakened before he could make sense of it.

Now that he was awake, Valjean didn't quite know what to do with himself.

Ought I make a fire? he thought. But neither Cosette nor Toussaint are here - is there really need to waste firewood on myself alone?

Valjean glanced out the window again. The wind's whistle was rising to a howl; the snow was coming down harder and harder. Valjean thought for a moment that he had perceived a dark figure standing on the street by the portress' lodge, illuminated by the weak light from her window, but then another gust of flurries blurred everything before his eyes and when he looked at that spot again, there was no one there.


	3. Chapter 3

No matter how hard Valjean strained to see through the darkness and the snow, he could not spot the figure again.

Must've been a shadow from the street lantern, he thought, rising from his knees with a cringe. If he were not to sleep, then a fire was in order before he lost the feeling in his extremities -and the extremities themselves to frostbite. His joints crunching audibly, Valjean moved to the hearth.

For a few minutes, Valjean remained crouched down, arranging firewood and stacking resin-tipped kindling sticks in a pyramid over it. Something kept scratching at his attention; something at the very edge of his mind's eye, like a faint star that becomes visible in the night sky only when one looks away from it but disappears when observed full on. Even as he struck fire from his third promethean match (the other two refusing to light for some unknown reason) and set the kindling aglow, the sensation grew in him that someone had been to the house while he was asleep.

And moreover, he suddenly knew beyond all shadow of doubt that they were still there.

Valjean paused with the smoldering match in his hand. The house was perfectly quiet. Even the wayward plank in the attic had ceased its lamentations. The only sounds to be heard were the howl of the wind, which had brewed up into a fierce storm since he'd woken up, and the crackling of the fire, the two sounds harmonizing together into a cozy symphony.

Valjean frowned and listened hard. Over the crackling and the wind, another sound could now be faintly discerned.

Footsteps.

A sudden biting pain in his hand startled Valjean: the match in his hand had burned down to his fingertips. He stood up as soundlessly as his clothes allowed and, without making a step towards the half-open door, leaned towards it.

There was no mistaking it. Soft, heavy footfalls coming up the stairs.

Valjean trembled.

Before his heart failed him, he decided that a known intruder was preferable to an unknown one. Steeling himself, Valjean reached out his hand, grasped the brass doorknob, took a fortifying breath and jerked the door open all the way, all-but leaping into the corridor with the blackened matchstick still clutched in his hand.

The staircase was empty.

I am imagining things, thought Valjean, who was becoming thoroughly flummoxed. Who would possibly come here? Cosette? abandoning her new husband and her wedding feast? Toussaint, leaving her mistress on such a day as this? Javert, rising from the dead to make the arrest due to him?

An ugly image suddenly arose in his mind of Javert's bloated corpse making its way cautiously up the stairs, its bulging, sodden coat covered in foul river weeds, the lead-headed cane feeling the steps cautiously before unseeing gray eyes.

Valjean shuddered and retreated back into his room, throwing a final glance downstairs towards the door. The key is not in the lock, reasoned Valjean, because it is in my pocket. He gripped his pocket and felt the satisfying weight of the key in his palm. If the key is with me, no one can enter without forcing the door or breaking the window, or at very least laboring their way through the chimney, which is full of hot smoke by now. This I cannot have slept through, since I wake from the slightest noise. Ergo, I am alone.

Having so calmed himself, Valjean lit a candle with a piece of kindling and, after some deliberation, plucked the dog-eared copy of the Voyages of Captain Cook from the bookshelf. Seating himself into the wicker-back chair, he leaned his head on his elbows, opened the book to where he had left off last time and engrossed himself once more in the search for the southern continent.

Some time passed. The fire had diminished from a violent orange flame to a cozy red glow and in the process had heated up the room most pleasantly. The storm outside was beginning to die down.

Valjean had just anchored with the crew of Resolution in the Dusky Bay when someone gave an audible cough right above his ear.

As if blown out of his chair by a fierce gale, Valjean rushed out of the room into the corridor. There was no one out on the stairs. Neither was there anyone in Cosette's room, nor in Toussaint's garret, nor in the drawing room, nor in the kitchen, nor the produce cellar.

Shaking his head at his own weak nerves, Valjean ascended the stairs once more, purposefully making noise with his boots as if to scare his own fears away. In the doorway of his room, he froze.

Behind his desk and in his chair sat the now-defunct Inspector Javert. He was clothed in his eternal greatcoat; his battered gray hat sat on the bed and his lead-tipped cane was leaned against the desk. Javert was flipping through Valjean's Voyages with a disdainful sneer.

"Cook is rubbish," he declared in a tone that allowed for no disputations, tossing the book finally back onto the table. "It's Humboldt you ought to be reading. Cook's New Zealand has nothing on Humboldt's New Andalusia."

It was all that Valjean's nerves could handle. The poor old man collapsed.


	4. Chapter 4

"…de la Condamine… de Bougainville… and Dampier – and Cook - do I sense a theme? Getting restless in your old age, Valjean? Brantome… d'Aubigny – both him and Brantome, eh? The two sides to the Huguenot story… Vely's History…Beccaria – oh!"

Javert's voice faded in and out like the flame of a weak-burning candle. With great difficulty, Valjean opened his eyes and realized that he was laying once more on the bed, on top of Cosette's clothing. Across the room, Javert was looking over his bookshelves with the quick, dismissive eye of an academician.

"What's this, then? _Hamlet_? In the original English?"

Javert's quick fingers plucked from the shelf a neat volume in octavo, opened it in the very middle then flipped back several pages.

"What is it that excellent advice that Polonius gives in this? " _To thine own self be true_ "? Or is it Horatio?"

"I don't know," said Valjean, surprising himself with the evenness of his voice. "I never got past the first scene."

Looking suddenly confused, Javert snapped the volume shut and inserted it carefully back into its place. Then his fingers pulled another, much slimmer book from Hamlet's vicinity.

"Ah!" Javert's mouth widened in a grin. "That explains the milk in the coconut!" he exclaimed, displaying to the man stretched out on the cot his trophy: a treatise on famous phrases from the works of Marlowe and Shakespeare, ostentatiously titled by its author " _Margaritas ante porcos_." Valjean had purchased it from a quay-side bookseller for ten sous, not because he was particularly curious about the ponderous Anglophobe's estimation of the pearls of English drama, but because the book-seller's little wife looked so terribly cold sitting on her stool in that ragged skirt and those miserable sabots. He had since skimmed the book once or twice.

"I imagined you as more of a Goethe person," remarked Valjean, who was now calm with the dreary calm of a man realizing that he is having a bad dream.

Javert gave him a humored look, then pressed his left hand to his breast and recited with quiet pathos:

" _Zwei Seelen wohnen, ach! in meiner Brust - die eine will sich von der andern trennen..._ "

He interrupted himself. "Sound familiar?" he asked Valjean.

"A bit," said Valjean.

"'A bit'! Rubbish! Of course you know this. If I know it, you know it."

"You give me too much credit."

Javert looked at him closely. "I don't think so," he said with a frown and continued the stanza in a different voice, a dreary, ponderous monotone. No matter how much Valjean strained to understand, his ears plucked out only distinct words but could not string them together into coherent sentences. When Javert finished and looked at him inquisitively, Valjean could only shrug.

"It sounded like gibberish to me," he admitted.

Javert smiled briefly again. "Well, then it must've been gibberish," he conceded easily, and turned his attention back to the bookshelves again.

For some reason, Valjean was no longer certain that he was asleep. "Was the article in the Moniteur false, then?" he asked hesitantly.

"Apparently," muttered Javert. Something about the spines on Valjean's next shelf – a collection of property law volumes – seemed to displease him.

"But why are you here now? Why didn't you come not six months ago?"

Javert's back stilled under his coat as he paused in his inspection. Then his face turned ever-so-slightly, so that Valjean could only see the hint of a piercing grey eye skewed towards him and the thin, disapproving line of the mouth.

"That I should be asking you, Valjean," he said slowly. "Why _am_ I here? It seems as though you'd been doing just dandy without me for the past six months" – Javert nodded almost imperceptibly towards the law books. "Dug up your treasure, invented your girl a family, killed it all off, married the girl to that dolt of a barrister - wonderfully crafty and illegal things."

"I never signed their marriage certificate!" protested Valjean.

"Yes, thank God for small favors," uttered Javert sarcastically, turning all the way towards Valjean and fixing him with an unblinking owlish gaze.

Valjean felt himself starting to sweat in disproportion to the warmth in the room.

"How did you get in here?" he asked quietly.

For several long seconds, Javert simply stared.

"Through the door," he answered finally in a voice reasonable to the point of mild idiocy.

"How did you do that?"

"How did I get in here through the door?" Javert sounded amused. "It's not an entirely impossible trick, walking through doors. How do _you_ manage it?"

"With a key," said Valjean in a hollow voice, pulling the latch-key from the pocket of his trousers and showing it to Javert on an extended palm. "With this key. Of which there is only one and which I keep on my person at all times." He swung his legs from the bed and, fighting a sudden sense of vertigo, assumed a sitting position. "H-how did you get in?"

Javert took a long look at the key, then walked up to the bed and pulled an identical key from the left pocket of his greatcoat.

"'Wherever you may hide away, I swear to you, I will be there,'" he said in a peculiar cadence and tossed the key onto Cosette's gown.

Valjean considered the double key with bafflement and wiped beads of cold sweat from his forehead.

"Is this a trick…?" he whispered.

Javert waited patiently. His light grey eyes seemed to phosphoresce in the dusk of the room.

"Am I forgetting something?" asked himself Valjean out loud. "It sounded like you were repeating a promise… An oath, even."

Javert said nothing.

"Why are you looking at me like that?"

"Just trying to ascertain the extent to which old age has affected your memory," said Javert. "You seem to have forgotten a good deal about me."

"I… I never knew that much about you to begin with."

Something flashed in Javert's eyes for a split second, rendering his face almost frightening.

"You are mistaken," he said in a very low voice. "You know everything about me."


	5. Chapter 5

Valjean felt himself break out in a cold sweat for God only knew what time that evening.

"What do you mean by that?"

Without breaking eye contact, Javert took two slow steps backwards and positioned himself by the smoldering fire, almost brushing the bricks of the hearth with the hem of his floor-length greatcoat.

"Why don't you take off your coat?" advised Valjean. "The fire is burning very hot; you'll singe it."

Mechanically, Javert's fingers went to his throat then paused there. "Yes," he said. "Yes, let's start there."

"What are we to start?"

"Your re-education, Valjean," sighed Javert. "Tell me quickly: what am I wearing underneath my coat?"

Valjean blinked.

"What?"

"You heard me. What am I wearing underneath my greatcoat?"

"H-how… how could I possibly know?" asked Valjean.

Javert rolled his eyes and set his jaw in a grimace of irritation.

"Give it a shot anyway."

"A… a black waistcoat?" said Valjean uncertainly. Javert nodded, urging him to go on. "And a grey vest under it. Silk."

"Pattern?"

"N-none… no, wait!… Squares, but barely discernable ones. Outlined in black."

"Excellent. I see you're getting the idea. And the trousers?"

"Tightly-tailored, black, with a single gray stripe down the outward seams. Watch pocket. Silver watch-chain."

With a magician's flourish, Javert flung off his coat, draping it over his arm– Valjean had not even noticed when he'd managed to unbutton it.

Valjean's mouth went instantly dry. "Impossible!.." he croaked.

Javert had on a grey vest of thick silk with a faintly discernable pattern of squares in black thread; over it, a black, well-fitted coat with a high waist and extremely short tails and underneath the coat, straight-legged black trousers with a single grey stripe running down the sides. An elegant watch chain glinted in the firelight. 

"Are things becoming clearer now?" inquired Javert, picking a speck of lint from a smooth black sleeve.

Blood was roaring in Valjean's ears. He felt himself on the verge of madness.

"Of course, there is a watch in your pocket," mumbled Valjean as if to himself. "It is also silver. And so is your snuffbox. Wood lined with silver."

"Anything in particular engraved on it?"

Valjean closed his eyes briefly and visualized a small oaken box with a delicately wrought silver pattern of leaves around the edges.

"'For excellent service,'" he said finally, opening his eyes.

In lieu of a response, Javert approached and sat down besides him on the bed, which sagged noticeably under his weight, and dropped his heavy coat on top of Cosette's garments. Impulsively, Valjean reached out to touch it. The thick grey cloth, worn soft by long years of use, was damp from the melted snowflakes.

Smiling slightly, Javert pulled Valjean's exactly imagined snuffbox from his pocket and flipped open its lid, demonstrating the engraving.

"Have a pinch?" he offered amiably.

Valjean jumped up:

"And you have silk stockings under your boots!" he exclaimed, pointing accusingly. "Open work! With pink lace around the edges!"

Javert's shoulders shook slightly in silent laughter. Extending a long leg, he raised the tip of a shiny black boot, looked at it and wiggled his toes, slightly perturbing the soft leather.

"I'm afraid not," he said with an almost disappointed smile.

"Why not?" asked Valjean. His head was spinning.

"Because you don't really believe that," said Javert. "There is a method to this madness."

Valjean backed away slowly from the bed, then threw open the bedroom door and ran down the stairs.

"And what's most interesting," went on Javert's voice right above his ear, as though he were not moving at all, "is that although you've been mad for some time now, you have quite forgotten all about it! Most strange."

In his haste to get out of the house, Valjean jerked the front door towards him without opening the lock. The doorknob came off in his hand. For a second, Valjean stood immobile, as the strange whisper of Javert's almost-silent laughter echoed off every wall in the house. Then he turned his back to the door, sank down heavily to the floor, and, dropping the amputated doorknob, hid his face in his hands.

"Who are you really, Javert?" he murmured dejectedly into his palms.

"Who am I really?" exclaimed Javert from somewhere to the side. Valjean looked up. Javert was now sitting at the dining room table with his arms crossed on his chest. "That is a very good question to ask yourself, Valjean. You've been asking yourself that question for many, many years."

"Are you real?"

"I'm as real as you are," said Javert seriously.

"Then am I a ghost?"

"No, you are quite alive."

"Then how can you appear and disappear like you do?" moaned Valjean. "How can my imagination determine what clothes you have on?"

He attempted to rise to his feet and attempt to pry the door open by some other means. Vertigo overcame him, and he sagged back down, down, down, onto the bed and against the wall, leaning his elbows on the quilt and his head against the cold wallpaper. Next to him, Javert was rolling the lead head of his cane between his palms distractedly. They were back in his bedroom. 

"I am very fond of mathematics, as you well know," said Javert. "It must be the latent Hindu within me. As you know, the wellspring of my race is Hindustan. And they've got quite a history with mathematics and chess and the like. It strikes me that a certain property of natural numbers describes our situation perfectly. You are fond of numbers, are you not, Valjean?"

Valjean said nothing. His mouth seemed to be filled with cotton.

"You see," went on Javert, "if one takes the square root of a positive natural number, the result can be either another positive natural number or an identical negative one. However, if one attempts to do the same with those two results, the root of the negative number will necessarily be imaginary. I am only reminding you of this because this is how you first described our situation to yourself all those years ago, when this game was just starting."

"The positive root of a number... and the imaginary root of its mirror image," finally murmured Valjean.

"Ah! you are starting to remember," said Javert with some satisfaction.

"You are not real," muttered Valjean, growing cold all over. "You have never been real."

"On the contrary. To you, I am more real than all the real things in the world."

"But only to me."

Javert barked out a laugh.

"Well, of course!" he exclaimed. "Who else besides you could possibly see and hear your own conscience?"


End file.
